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Mary McCarty: Is a mother's grief punishment enough in child's death?
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Doughnuts.
Doughnuts.
Extras
It was a simple, mundane, guilty-pleasure trip to Busken Bakery that slipped a cog in the daily routine of a Clermont County mother and set a tragedy in motion.
Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby disrupted her daily schedule to pick up doughnuts for a staff meeting at Glen Este Middle School, where she is assistant principal. As a result, she said, she forgot that her 2-year-old daughter, Cecilia, was sleeping in the car seat behind the driver's seat. The little girl died of heat stroke after spending more than eight hours in the car on a day when temperatures soared to nearly 100 degrees.
Everyone's heart breaks for this mother who is living an unimaginable nightmare. But this is a case that calls for more than empathy. It is a case that demands that we ask tough questions about Ohio's judicial statute, which makes it virtually impossible to charge this mother with child endangering despite the extreme circumstances of Cecilia's death.
The case has left Cincinnati-area residents passionately divided, and the controversy has only escalated since Clermont County Prosecutor Don White announced Tuesday that no charges would be filed in the case.
Reaction falls into two categories: people who believe the mother has suffered enough, and should not be charged, and those who believe that a serious miscarriage of justice has occurred. In one particularly cruel response, a Cincinnati Enquirer reader noted that "Don White and Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby should be put in a vehicle together for eight-hours plus to experience Cecilia's horrible death ..."
You don't have to be lacking in compassion for the mother, however, to be troubled by the lack of charges in this case. It's not that I fault Don White; he said he won't be swayed by popular opinion. (Look at what happened with the Duke lacrosse case.)
University of Dayton criminal law professor Dennis Turner said Ohio's law is very clear: Charges of child endangerment require an act of recklessness, which requires an intentional act of putting the child's life at risk. "It appears from all the facts that she simply forgot, which does not meet the standard for recklessness," Turner said. "Don White knew that he had to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that she acted recklessly."
For a lay person, that's very difficult to understand. If leaving a toddler in a hot car for eight hours doesn't constitute child endangerment, what does? If it isn't reckless, what is?
And what's to prevent another parent from doing the same thing on purpose, and making it look like an accident?
Union Twp. police recommended that Nesselroad-Slaby be charged with child endangering. In a recently released videotape, the sobbing mother tells the detectives, "I tried to be everything to everybody, and I failed."
That's a sentiment with which every parent can identify. But here's something with which most of us can't identify: Nesselroad-Slaby's apparent habit of leaving her daughter unattended for short periods of time. According to police reports, she was warned last winter by the day care providers for her other daughter, 5-year-old Allison, not to leave Cecilia unattended in the car when picking up Allison. Nesselroad-Slaby apologized but continued the practice, leaving Cecilia alone in the car on both the days prior to her death.
Carelessness, it seems, had become habitual. Nesselroad-Slaby relaxed that iron rule about NEVER leaving small children unattended in the car. How many times have you grumbled as you unbuckled a kid from a car seat to run a two-minute errand to the grocery store? If you're like me, thousands of times. But you do it, every time, because the potential consequences of not doing it are too terrible to imagine.
Nesselroad-Slaby apparently lost that instinct, with unforeseen tragic consequences.
"Good mothers don't do this," she told investigators. She's right.
It's also true, as many have said, that no punishment could be as severe as the one she's already suffering. "I can't imagine what I could do as a prosecutor to make it any worse for her," White said.
But we don't say, "She's suffered enough," when a child dies because a mother was driving drunk, or traveling at excessive speeds, or because she left the child home alone.
Under current Ohio law, those are practically the only circumstances under which a parent can be charged with child endangering.
Cecilia Slaby's accidental death evokes profound sympathy for her family but also raises the question about a law that doesn't hold her mother accountable other than through her own grief.
People can vouch for her sincerity. But can anybody vouch for this law?
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@Dayton
DailyNews.com.
